Ship insurance off Bulgaria triples after Black Sea drone attacks
Premiums for ships and cargo in Bulgaria's exclusive economic zone have tripled after drone strikes on merchant vessels. Shipowners warn higher freight costs could soon feed into prices.
Symbolic image · Photo: Alexey Komarov / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Insurance for ships and cargo off Bulgaria's coast has risen sharply after drone attacks on merchant vessels in the Black Sea. Shipowner Captain Todor Georgiev told state broadcaster BNT, and earlier bTV, that hull and cargo premiums in the exclusive economic zone tripled last week after the attacks. Insurers responded the very next day with a circular, he said. Georgiev expects passage through Bulgarian territorial waters to become more expensive as well, as the attacks move closer to the coast.
For some vessels, a single week at sea can now cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in war-risk cover, BNT reported. By comparison, Georgiev cited about $70,000 as the standard annual insurance for one of his company's 50,000-tonne ships. Earlier, a Lukoil manager in Bulgaria told BNT insurance for a tanker had climbed from about $200,000 to $2.5 million within a few months.
A ship agent told BNT that no orders had been cancelled so far. But any halt or slowdown in shipping would make transport more expensive and quickly push up the cost of goods and services in Bulgaria, he said. Plamen Rusev, chairman of the Bulgarian Maritime Association, said the main risk lies with voyages to Ukrainian and Russian ports and that there was no logical economic reason for higher premiums for Bulgarian ports.